Social Tagging In The Enterprise: Different Drivers, Different Implementations

David Hobbie

Litigation Knowledge Managerhttp://caselines.blogspot.com June 25, 2008

©2007. Goodwin Procter LLP

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Trudy

Alicia DavidDoug Patty

Tagging is the “T” in SLATES*

Search Links Authorship Tags Extensions Signals

*Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, Andrew McAfee, MIT/Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006, Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 21-28.

Drivers of Tagging on the Web

• Retrieve one’s own stored information more easily

• Take advantage of other people’s tags

• Comments?

Business Drivers of Enterprise Tagging:FIND TOO LITTLE

• We can’t find documents

• We can’t find internal experts

• We don’t know about new work

Business Drivers of Enterprise Tagging:FIND TOO MUCH

• Email

• Places to go look

• Taxonomies

• Similar Documents

Adapting Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking To The Enterprise

• Security, security, and security

• Groups / Tasks / Projects

• User identification

• Outside the firewall

• Versions

What Drives Enterprise Adoption?

• Enhanced findability

• Workflow (cf: “traditional KM”)

• Millenial / Gen. X; Ambition, Self-promotion

• Gen Y; engagement

What Features Enhance Tagging Adoption?

• Help features

• Tagging Description

Variations in Enterprise Tagging--Search

• How are tags exposed through search?

• Guided navigation

• Search relevancy

Variations in Enterprise Tagging—What you can tag

• Is tagging linked into DMS, or is it limited to social software activity (blogs, wikis)?

• Can you tag people? Groups?

• Can you tag an activity or project?

• Can you tag external web resources?

• Can you subscribe to RSS or email alerts for a specific tag or tags?

• Can projects be privately set up and tagged for a group? (layers of security)

• How much of people's work is exposed?

Variations in Enterprise Tagging—Publishing & Security

What Tagging Does For An Enterprise

• Few tag, many consume

• Identify others working on same subjects through finding comparable tags

• Highlights stronger content

• Distinguishes otherwise similar work product

Common Problems With Enterprise Adoption

• Don’t tag everything “document”

• Don’t suggest tags on content except from a person’s own tags

• Too many similar tags (stemming, plurals)

Common Problem Solutions

• Prompting on single tagging

• Stemming

• Synonym Identification

• Taxonomist?

Sharepoint Tagging Vendors

• Connectbeam “Spotlight”—tag anything with a URL

• Newsgator “Social Sites”—tag RSS feed information

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